The Last Mile

Melvin Mars awaits his fate on Death Row. He was one of America's most promising football stars until, aged twenty-years-old, he was arrested and convicted for the murder of his parents just as he was due to begin a very lucrative contract with the NFL. When Amos Decker, newly appointed special agent with the FBI, hears the news that Melvin was saved in the final seconds before his execution because someone has confessed to the killings, he persuades his boss to allow him to carry out an investigation into the Mars murders.

The FBI hire Amos Decker, a man who can remember everything, to take part in a special task force to solve cold cases. Decker is fixated on looking into the case of a convicted murderer who is given a reprieve just moments before his execution because another man confessed to the crime. Decker aims to discover the truth.

Interesting plot (albeit implausible) and likable characters make this book a good read.

You can always count on Baldacci to deliver the goods when it comes to writing a good yarn.
There's a man on death row for the murder of his father and mother who gets a reprieve thirty minutes before he's supposed to be checked out. Only, all along, he's sworn his innocence. The cavalry, er, the FBI's brought in to investigate.
This story has more twists and turns than a snake swimmin' cross a river.
Who were his mother and father? Who was really responsible for their death? Why have twenty year old dental records that had to be used to identify the bodies burned beyond recognition in their old house strangely gone missing?
Just when you've figured out this story it takes a ninety degree turn and everything you thought you figured out turns into vapour.
For sure you're gonna like this story.

Quotes

He was a big man, six-five, and about halfway between three and four hundred pounds— the exact number depended on how much he ate at a particular meal. He was a former college football player with a truncated stint in the NFL, where a vicious blindside hit had altered his mind and given him pretty much a perfect memory. Hyperthymesia, as it was technically known.

“I have synesthesia.” “Synes-what?” “Synesthesia. It’s when your sensory pathways are commingled. I see certain numbers in color, for instance. And I saw my family’s murder in blue. I see death in blue. I also have hyperthymesia.” “What’s that?” “A perfect memory.”

… the Texas State Penitentiary at Huntsville. It was called the Walls Unit because of the prison’s redbrick walls. Opened in 1849, it was the oldest prison in the Lone Star State.

He’d been in this place almost as long as he’d not been in this place. And the time had not gone by fast. It didn’t feel like twenty years. It felt like two hundred.

Roy and Lucinda Mars, his white father and black mother. Back then that combination had been weird, different, exotic even, certainly in West Texas. Now it was commonplace. Every kid coming in now looked like bits and pieces of fifty different types of humanity.

He would have been forty-two years old in two months. His forty-first had been his very last birthday, as it turned out.

He wasn’t going to say anything. They had brought him to the party. They were going to have to start the music.

When he was anxious, he ate. When he was really anxious he was a garbage disposal.

Decker did not believe in fate, or even its little cousin, serendipity.

“Did you know that there are hundreds of people released each year from prison because they’ve been found to be innocent?”

Time did not heal wounds for him. Not for someone who could never forget. Their murders were as fresh now as when they occurred. Not just the visuals, but also the emotional hatchet attached to the mental images. They would be until the day he died.

… malodorous air that hung over them all like a marine layer of toxic gas.

America didn’t have prisons. It had chaos pens where men were transported back seventeen centuries. Where the strong survived until it met something even stronger, and where the weak died every time.

“And you bought me quinoa? Seriously? Is that even a food?”

“ … Do you think it has anything to do with their deaths?” “I don’t see how. But what I don’t see right now could fill a library.”

“Whatever your father feels or doesn’t feel about you, Melvin, has nothing to do with you,” said Jamison firmly. “It’s his issue, not yours.”

Melvin’s already lost twenty years of his life. I don’t want him to waste another second over a lost cause.”

“ … From the forties to the sixties and on. Riots, lynchings, shootings, things blown or burned up. Folks murdered. Federal marshals all over the place. The National Guard. Coloreds”—

“ … And in Mississippi, football rests only one rung below going to church as a state pastime.”

… but face it, this is a podunk town.

“It is my problem, because I chose to make it mine.”

Eastland’s plane had gotten bigger now that he dealt more with cyber than guns. The manufacturing costs were a lot lower and the ability to gouge Uncle Sam under a trillion bytes of bullshit was even higher.

“ … You can think those things if you want, but for God’s sake, keep those thoughts in your head.”

I was a tailback, man, one injury away from it all being over. And there are lots of examples of dudes like me coming out after wrecking college ball and then you find out you can’t run against the big boys in the NFL.

“ … He’s going to throw us some curveballs, it’s just how the guy’s wired.” “What sort of curveballs?” “Hell if I know. I played football, not baseball.”

My parents were pretty much sharecroppers. The only toilet I had growing up was the one at school. Most days I went out into the fields and picked my own meals.

“You got one minute and then we open fire. And we’re packing incendiary rounds.”